[Dave B]

I just picked up a 500 Mhz Titanium (Mercury) off of Craigslist for $45.00.
It was missing the battery, power supply, and hard drive. I borrowed a friend's 45 watt adaptor
and battery (from a 667 Mhz Ti 'book) to test with. The good news is that it powers on with
both the battery and power adaptor; charges the battery, and I was able to boot up using a
Tiger install DVD. System Profiler (on the DVD) shows that it still has the original 256 MB RAM stick.

The bad news is that the screen has some lines, as shown below. Do any of you guys recognize this?



I'm guessing it's the logic board, which is somewhat bad news, since $80.00 is the cheapest I've seen
them on Ebay. I'm trying to figure out whether it's worth it to try to fix it, even if I find the cheapest
battery and adaptor possible. I can use the 12 GB hard drive from my Pismo, at least for the time being.
These Powerbooks seem to sell for around $300.00 on Ebay.

Also, how does the 500 Mhz G4 compare to the 400 Mhz G3 Pismo performance wise?
My biggest gripe with the Pismo is that it chokes on H264 and MPEG-4 video, and also
on most embedded wmv stuff; Google Video, Youtube ect.

Thanks in advance for any comments/advice. Incidentally, I'm hoping to eventually get a CD 2 Macbook
(2 Ghz white midrange model), and am using the Pismo––and possibly the Ti 'book––to tide me over.

[romeosc]

It is the LCD that is bad, The traces or maybe the ribbon cable has broken lines. Apple's repair is replacement of screen $800!

[camerontrial]

no, i had this problem one day on my brand new 17inch core 2 duo mbp, and it just appeared, so i took it in. It turned out to be something to do with the backlight, since it was still uder warrenty, my 17 inch screen got replaced 4 free

[JonoMarshall]

It's more than likely that the LDVS cable running through one of your hinges is damaged, you can replace this cable, but it's not easy, you have to lift the board, feed the exisitng cable out of a small hole in the chassis, open up the TiBook screen assembly at the bottom, yank the old cable down (note. don't 'yank' it!), feed the new cable upwards, press it in with a dull platic implement, feed the cable back through the small chasis hole (without scratching the pins of the connector), reset the board/re-connect HD, etc, blah, blah...

It's possible but unlikely that you have a problem with your board/backlight, my bets the LVDS cable, but it's a real b*tch to play around with, eek.